About Vadim Tkachenko

Vadim leads Percona's development group, which produces Percona Clould Tools, the Percona Server, Percona XraDB Cluster and Percona XtraBackup. He is an expert in solid-state storage, and has helped many hardware and software providers succeed in the MySQL market.

Comments

Classic edition has lower license cost if you need to buy server licenses… for example for OEM use. There is no pressing need to charge extra for partitions for these guys

I’m curious however if Partitions are going to be the only difference between Advanced an Pro or this is just for starters and we will see some more cuts… Oh I guess we do not know yet it depends if Partitions will be enough to up-sell or more cuts will be required

Oh look, it’s really quite simple… none of these distinctions make sense to anybody but Sun/MySQL. It’s indeed about licensing fees and support levels. It’s also complicated, and thus blah. Users/customers don’t really want to know or care about all this, so they’ll try to ignore it.

In our corner, the OurDelta builds come in regular and bleeding edge. That’s clear, quite mainstream, the feature is useful rather than marketing foo, and the packages are easy to install and update. Let’s just focus on getting the 5.1 patches finished, and on with it, my friends.

At least the ‘Pro’ and ‘Advanced’ builds are now live on https://customer.mysql.com but I see no mention of the ‘Classic’ builds and am not exactly sure why anyone would want to run with Partitioning and without InnoDB I asked for clarification on the differences between the builds, the point of ‘Advanced’ is that customers who are *only* paying for a ‘Basic’ or ‘Silver’ subscription don’t get support on new/fancy features like partitioning.

I think it’s interesting that you have not focused on the fact that MySQL is reserving partitioning for it’s highest level customers, but is providing it *free* in the Community edition. I’m sure that if anything got left out of Community, it would be prominently mentioned – maybe there’s some credit to be given MySQL/Sun on this decision?

Alex, Classic is for OEMs who don’t need transaction support and do want lowest possible licensing cost for a non-GPL build. OEMs can see it in their OEM download location if they have a license for it, just as other Enterprise customers can see whatever other versions their support package entitles them to.

Vadim,

Enterprise isn’t just “server”, it’s server plus support plus tools so its subscriptions are packaged and priced based on the costs and benefits of the mixture of features it provides.

5.0 Community has no partitioning and has never had it. 5.1 Enterprise has no partitioning and has never had it but includes support subscriptions and the excellent Enterprise Manager software.

5.1 Pro has MySQL support, Enterprise Manager and the various 5.1 additions and performance improvements. 5.1 Advanced has 5.1 Pro features and adds support for partitioning as well. 5.1 Community has no support at all from MySQL’s support team but includes partitioning in the server, without MySQL support.

All get something added and nobody who is using 5.0GA will have anything cut out by upgrading to 5.1GA.

It’s natural enough that you as a third party support provider might view just the Community server as the full thing and ignore the MySQL support and Enterprise Manager to sell your own services instead. Describing it as a cut is misleading when it’s a new feature, though.

MySQL could have chosen not to add partitioning to the GA Community server, leaving you and other third party providers with no option to use or sell support for it. We have added it so you do get the chance to sell support and tool add-ons for it, just as we do.

Best wishes for a profitable new year built on the components we’re freely choosing to provide to you!

We are building our business on open source components, we widely use Linux, Apache, PHP, Sphinx, MySQL and many others. Do you see something wrong about it? And yes, we really appreciate that Linux developers give filesystem ext3 for free, we say thanks to Apache developers that they do not close mod_status and do not ask money for it. We are happy that PHP developers have php_db* functions open for everyone. And Sphinx developer Andrew Aksenoff made it available for everybody just to make some sense of FullText search nowadays. And – yes, thanks to Sun we still can download source code from dev.mysql.com.

I still wonder who Sun’s target audience for MySQL Enterprise is. I’m a long time MySQL user, I would be interested in and willing to pay for Enterprise Monitor or Query Analzyer. But only if I get the full thing, not some stripped down version. I don’t need support or consulting, especially not on a monthly subscription, and as DBA and Developer I can’t even justify to my superiors paying for commercial support for things that I’m hired to do. I don’t need binaries because either I got a linux distrubution to provide them or if I’m not happy with that I can always compile it by myself (and then even the enterprise releases). I really wonder who buys Enterprise and why.

One interesting thing about Enterprise is probably that you have a stronger say in what gets fixed and which features are added.

That is the whole model! Having support mandatory part of the package allows you to justify charging subscription for it otherwise you could just buy software and use it for years compromising MySQL revenue and financial stability

Many software features are only available in software shipped with high Enterprise subscription level. You see advertised price of some $600 per server per year for MySQL Enterprise ? But wait if you want to have any cool features like Replication monitoring or Query Analyzer you’ll pay $3000 even though these are features which should allow you to give you self help and actually reduce need for MySQL Support.

If you’re looking for things like Performance Adviser you’ve got to pay whole $5000 for each server per year.

I guess this model is suitable for the customer base that Sun/MySQL want, but not for me so the only thing left for me to do is built my own Tools, with Blackjack and Hookers I don’t consider it expensive, it’s just not what I need and want.

I personally do not think this is either fair or good deal for the customer. Though you may be right about yourself – people who would rather spend their own time than money are not mysql target market.